You're in the Army now, Ryan Newman

FORT BRAGG, N.C. – Warning to the garage area: If you have a problem with Ryan Newman this season, it might be better to just take a deep breath and let it go.
 
Newman, now driving the U.S. Army car, has both deadly aim and access to some deadly weapons – and he’s on a mission. You don’t want to mess with this guy.
 
Remember how the rival phone company nerds tried to mess with Newman in those Alltel commercials? The new Newman would just load a .50-caliber assault rifle and blow them away.
 
He practiced his aim during Monday’s visit to Fort Bragg, the massive Army base in southeastern North Carolina that serves as headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division and the Army’s Special Forces, among others.
 
Lying on his stomach, Newman took aim at a car several hundred meters away – way off in the distance, really – and blasted .50-caliber shots from a sniper rifle.
 
Hearing protection has always been a good idea when Newman is driving his car nearby. But during his shooting display, it was required.
 
In addition to firing some serious weaponry – automatic weapons and pistols along with sniper rifles – Newman participated in a room-to-room assault that simulates urban warfare conditions and tried his flying skills in a skydiving simulator.
 
Fort Bragg, which occupies 167,000 acres of land near Fayetteville, is home to anywhere from 52,000-60,000 soldiers at a time, depending on deployments. The Army says the base is like a small city, and there’s much truth to that.
 
It has its own schools, churches, shopping centers and police department. And driving around the roads inside the base, you wouldn’t know you were on a military installation if not for the street signs like “[Operation] Just Cause Drive.”
 
The base even has an ice skating rink, which, according to the public affairs woman listing off these facts, the surrounding civilian population does not.
 
“Do you have a go-kart track?” Newman asked her.
 
No, she replied – one of the few things not on the base.
 
That was OK with Newman. There wasn’t anything to race, but there was plenty of stuff to shoot.
 
First up was the Engagement Skills Trainer, which could only be described as the most realistic video game ever made. Holding a real M-16 retrofitted with special technology for training purposes, Newman and guests from his team and the media dropped to the floor and took aim at enemy combatants displayed on a wide screen perhaps half the size of one in a movie theater.
 
With unlimited ammo (thanks to a computer adjustment by the instructors), the group fired away with infrared shots as the guns crackled and vibrated, leveling insurgents and other enemies until there were none left.
 
Newman recorded four kills in the first battle, which took place in a “target-rich” industrial area, then took care of six more in the open desert, which was the highest of anyone in the group.
 
He also took the highest number of shots (nearly 300) – clearly the sign of someone not used to taking his foot off the gas.
 
Before the next stop, the instructors were kind enough to show Newman and his guests into the “vault,” which housed many of the larger weapons that could be swapped out in the simulation.
 
There were grenade launchers (the Army says its MK-19 can launch 225 grenades in 60 seconds, but it’s not approved for use in war due to the massive amount of collateral damage it would cause) and rocket launchers along with super-sized machine guns and automatic weapons.
 
Rambo would have been jealous.
 
Newman was then escorted to Humvee rollover training, where a soldier demonstrated how to escape an upside-down vehicle through a back hatch, wriggling his way out like a contortionist.
 
Fortunately, Newman himself wasn’t subjected to the training (his burly frame might have caused him some difficulty). But when the soldier began to speak about the most difficult parts of being upside down (“Your helmet is resting against the ceiling,” he said), Newman felt he could relate.
 
“I’ve been there,” he chimed in. “The thing that trips up most race-car drivers is that when you’re upside down, you release your belts but you forget to release the steering wheel, and you get hung up by your legs. You have to release the wheel first, then the belts.”
 
After lunch at the mess hall (the cuisine was much better than in the movies), it was time for the fun stuff: The live range.
 
Newman and his guests got to fire all sorts of weapons at Range 37, the highlight of which was the aforementioned .50-caliber sniper rifle.
 
Even as stout as Newman is, his entire body rocked backward with each pull of the trigger. The concussion from the weapon sent shockwaves that could be easily felt from 50 feet away, and so much heat is emitted from the barrel that it left the shooter in a cloud of burnt grass after each blast.
 
The shell from each shot is as long as a middle finger, and a bit thicker.
 
An avid hunter, Newman was plenty familiar with handling guns. And it showed – he scored a 95 in the Beretta M9 pistol shooting contest. That’s a 95 out of 100.
 
“Unbelievable,” company commander Pete Kranenberg said later. “This has got to be the most impressive NASCAR team I’ve ever seen.”
 
Perhaps the highlight of the entire day – aside from seeing Newman dressed in a yellow XL jumpsuit trying to “fly” in the vertical wind tunnel – was the room-to-room assault demonstration.
 
With Newman dressed in full combat gear (but safely in the back of the assault team), a group of soldiers “raided” a home with suspected insurgents by literally blowing off the door with a small explosive, then charging inside and going from room to room, shooting any enemies they found.
 
The enemies were actually cardboard cutouts in this case and didn’t fire back, but it was still thrilling nonetheless.
 
By the end of the day, Newman had gained a much greater appreciation for what his new sponsor was all about. He recalled one demonstration in a “laser-shoot house” that projected enemies on the wall in order to simulate the most accurate conditions.
 
In that small, dark room, soldiers fired actual shots into material that could absorb the bullets.
 
“The biggest thing that caught my eye was just the extent of detail that goes into their training,” Newman said. “They’re shooting live rounds in a 30-by-30 cube, with other people standing right next to you. It’s a true training mission.
 
“That, to me, was neat as to just how dedicated to detail they are to be safer and smarter.”
 
If Newman’s team takes any cues from its new sponsor’s dedication, it shouldn’t have any problem excelling on the track.